


Sunrise on the Sixth Floor Fire Escape

by eskandarrohani (erohani)



Category: Kingdom Hearts
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Complete, M/M, One Night Stands, Past Character Death, Suicidal Thoughts, Suicide Attempt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-15
Updated: 2019-12-15
Packaged: 2021-02-26 05:27:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,940
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21788245
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/erohani/pseuds/eskandarrohani
Summary: Vanitas doesn’t know it yet, but he’s going to be the last person Ventus ever sees.
Relationships: Vanitas & Ventus (Kingdom Hearts), Vanitas/Ventus (Kingdom Hearts)
Comments: 7
Kudos: 91





	Sunrise on the Sixth Floor Fire Escape

**Author's Note:**

> Please read the tags carefully.

It’s dark outside when Vanitas wakes in an unfamiliar bedroom, his mouth grainy and still tasting of cum and one shot too many.

It’s silent, save for the hum of the ceiling fan overhead, which spins furiously but doesn’t take the edge off the heat trapped in the room. There’s no sign of the other guy, which suits Vanitas just fine. One night stands may have become something of a specialty as of late, but he’s not quite mastered the conversations that accompany an encounter’s time of death. He’s better off sneaking out before the guy returns from pissing or puking or whatever it is he’s doing.

Vanitas moves as quietly as he can manage on his rubbery legs, while his eyes struggle to stay focused on recovering his clothing from a floor that lurches up to meet him. In spite of the double-whammy of dehydration strangling his brain and the poor light seeping in from the window, the task is made easy because the bedroom appears to be completely packed away in a small series of boxes slouching in a corner.

Pulling his clothes on proves to be more of a challenge. Not only is he aching from the night before, his limbs feel numb to sensation, slow to register stimuli and even slower to obey orders. After grappling with the button on his jeans for an embarrassing amount of time, Vanitas gives up and leaves it undone. He’s looked sketchier. It’s fine.

He finds all of his shit on the floor—with the notable exceptions of his phone, wallet, and keys, which all sit on the bedside table with an intentionality that Vanitas doesn’t have after a night pursuing alcohol poisoning and reckless sex.

A perspiring glass of cold water stands sentinel over his things, melting the edge of a bookmark from the Strand with two phone numbers ( _Terra 212-555-7417_ , _Aqua 917-555-0562_ ) written in a tired scrawl. Vanitas takes a greedy gulp of water, relishing how it soothes his sandpaper throat. A closer look at the bedside table reveals three painkillers, rusty red like three drops of dried blood.

Thoughtful gestures from the guy. Way more thoughtful than anyone else Vanitas has gone home with before. More thoughtful than he’s ever been. 

Vanitas mulls over this while he swallows the pills and thumbs open his phone. There’s only one text from Sora, which makes his molars grind, because it’s past four in the morning and shouldn’t Sora be a little more concerned that his cousin hasn’t turned up in two days? Even cops would consider him missing.

He opens the text: _Hey, I know you’re going through a lot and I want to give you space to think. But when you want to talk about it, you know where to find me._

Son of a _bitch_.

He leaves Sora on read, drains his glass, and sets it back on the nightstand.

Then, after a moment of blinking at it, picks it up again. The least he can do is return it to the kitchen.

*

Once the bedroom door clicks shut behind him, the darkness of the apartment comes to press heavy on his mind. No nightlight flinches to life as he pads through the living room. No glow peeks from under the bathroom door when he passes by, close enough to hear the faucet drip. The blinds are all slatted shut, hanging motionless over closed windows. 

Any fans or window units that may once have been in place are long gone. With the windows shut, the air has gone stagnant. It’s warm out here, thick in that unwelcome way that New York summers insist on, and it smells a bit too clean. Vanitas can smell the effort put into making these floors immaculate. Effort is lemon scented.

There’s furniture, but no belongings. Just more boxes stacked in corners.

In the fleeting moment between two breaths, the room swims and he’s standing in the apartment he shared with Skuld and Ephemer.

There’s no sign of the guy.

Vanitas goes to the kitchen.

Like the rest of the apartment, the kitchen is all packed up. Unlike the rest of the apartment, one of the boxes here has been neatly sliced open. Inside, there’s just enough space amid the crumpled packing paper to tuck a single glass.

Vanitas flips the box shut, glass still in hand.

He pours himself another cup of water and drinks it.

Outside, the hollow ring of struck metal sings through the quiet, barely audible through the closed window. No, Vanitas realizes as he draws closer to the window, where a light draft coaxes the scratchy curtain into a sway. Not closed, but cracked open. He sweeps the curtain aside. 

The next ten seconds of his life play out in slow motion. 

Out on the fire escape is the other guy— _Ventus_ , that’s his name—his silhouette edged in the sickly glow from the nearby streetlight, blond hair rumpled from sleep. He leans over the railing. 

No, he’s not leaning over it. 

Vanitas goes very still. 

_He’s climbing over it_. 

Vanitas drops his glass and yanks the window open. 

Ventus startles badly, fingers scrabbling at the railing in a white knuckled grip that makes Vanitas want to laugh or scream, because this guy’s suffocated apartment is all packed up, he has fully climbed over the railing, and there is a goddamn noose around his neck, but he’s _still_ afraid of falling. There’s a vacancy in his eyes that recedes as he makes sense of Vanitas in the window. His whole face crumples. “Oh,” Ventus says, voice soft, “you weren’t supposed to see this.”

Vanitas can hardly breathe. “I wasn’t supposed to see this?” he whispers. “I wasn’t supposed to see _this part_ , you mean.” He was meant to wake to the aftermath.

Ventus recoils as if he’s been slapped, and a spark of panic shoots up Vanitas’ spine, because this is _not_ how you’re supposed to talk to people who are about to hang themselves. The two of them stay where they are, paralyzed by the situation. Water from the dropped glass creeps into the fabric of Vanitas’ socks as he scours his memory for every movie he’s ever seen that might be helpful.

His thoughts, unbidden, zero in on the text he got from Sora. He wishes Sora was here. He would’ve known what to do, what to say. Vanitas works a long inhale through his body and out his mouth, then forces himself to maintain eye contact with Ventus. Sora’s not here. He is.

Vanitas puts his hand on the window ledge, trying not to move too suddenly, but needing, desperately, to close the distance between them. “Wait,” he says, and he’s not really sure of the last time he tried to be gentle for someone. He feels like an imposter. He hopes it’s not too obvious. “Let’s talk.”

“You’re not going to talk me out of this,” Ventus rasps out between chattering teeth. He looks like every bone in his body is trembling. He trembled like this last night, too, all but begging to be held, blue eyes glassy and wild.

“I…” Vanitas stops. He thinks about last night. He didn’t have many expectations when he went home with Ventus. Nice hands, nice face, nice lay. But there was something about the way that he kissed that felt off-center, like he was one breath away from screaming.

And maybe that’s why they went home together, because Vanitas has been holding in a scream for a while now. It’s gotten to the point that he worries that if he ever gave in and let that scream slip out, he’ll never be able to stop.

He thinks about the glass of water and the painkillers left for him on the nightstand, the way Ventus looked when he smiled—like he was out of practice.

“Okay,” Vanitas says, and another violent shudder tears through Ventus’ body. Vanitas slides his body up onto the window ledge. There’s a scant couple of feet separating them, but if he doesn’t choose his words carefully, the space could be just enough. “If you’re going to do this, then okay. I respect your decision. But first let’s just talk for a little. We didn’t talk very much last night. It seems only right.”

“There’s nothing to talk about,” Ventus says immediately.

When Vanitas tries to climb onto the fire escape, the peaks of Ventus’ shoulders rise like a gargoyle’s wing tips. So he withdraws and affects what he hopes is an appropriately nonthreatening expression. “Then this should be quick,” Vanitas reasons. “So what’s the harm?”

“I don’t want to talk.”

“So I’ll talk.” Not ideal. None of this is. Talking about himself is not something he does, and he absolutely does not talk about his feelings. He’d rather die.

That’s when Vanitas blinks and looks at Ventus. Really looks at him. Ventus would rather die than talk about his feelings. He had planned to.

Vanitas’ throat constricts. Why the fuck is he even here. Literally anyone else would be better equipped for this moment.

He doesn’t want to talk.

But Ventus’ face is a dissertation in all kinds of exhaustion, a map to a dead end, and Vanitas has stared at that expression every morning in the mirror since Ephemer and Skuld. He wonders if this is what Sora feels whenever Vanitas disappears for days at a time and leaves him on read.

“I wish my cousin was here,” is what falls out of Vanitas’ mouth, chasing the end of a sigh. “He’s better at talking about emotions and shit.”

Ventus asks, “Do you talk to him about emotions?”

A beat.

“No.”

“So maybe he’s not as good at it as you think.” Ventus’ gaze drifts toward the building studded horizon, where the approaching dawn bleaches the lingering inky night. “No offense.”

Irritation licks at the backs of Vanitas’ eyeballs even as he forces out a noncommittal grunt. So much for not wanting to talk. “It’s not for a lack of trying,” Vanitas replies, battling through his lizard brain’s desire to dig its claws in. “He makes an effort. It’s my fault we don’t talk.”

“The end result is still the same. Failure is failure.”

“Is it a failure?” Vanitas counters. “He’s shown that he cares.”

Vanitas leans forward over the windowsill, slips a single leg out, and presses his foot down on the landing. The steel grating digs into his wet sock. If Ventus notices, he doesn’t comment. He’s still staring out at the skyline, lips thinning as he thinks.

Finally, Ventus says, “But what if he gets tired of talking to a brick wall? How do you think he feels when you brush him off?” There’s an edge to his voice, betraying an old wound that never quite healed. He turns to glare at Vanitas. “How do you think he feels if _you_ never ask him how he’s doing?”

“How do you think it makes him feel?”

Ventus grits his teeth. “ _Discarded_.” He’s shaking again. His eyes, cold and flinty, stay fixed on Vanitas’ face, but it’s clear that he’s not actually seeing Vanitas—only a convenient proxy to rage at. And this right here, this is something Vanitas can understand. Anger is a language he’s fluent in.

He asks, “Do you feel discarded, Ventus?”

He ducks his head against his chest, the rough fiber of the noose digging into his adam’s apple. “I’m not talking about myself,” he mutters. He unclaws a hand from the railing—and Vanitas nearly leaps out of his skin, ready to catapult himself forward and seize Ventus from the air—but Ventus merely drags it over his clammy face. His hand returns to the railing, and Vanitas sags.

“I’m so tired,” Ventus sighs.

He’s not the only one. 

“Today wasn’t supposed to go this way.”

“Was this always your plan?” Vanitas wonders aloud. “Bring someone home, have them find you in the morning?”

He thinks back to last night when Ventus slid into the seat beside him at the bar, breath smelling like three-drinks-in and clutching something with a ridiculous number of maraschino cherries in his hand. Vanitas was five in himself, and already turning to the sixth in the hopes that he could lower the volume on the static that constantly shrieked in his head. Ventus had smiled at him, weary, but fully present, and said, _Neither of us should be alone right now_. There had been something in the way he pronounced these words that resonated with Vanitas. But he’d been too drunk and self centered to think about how _neither of us_ included someone who wasn’t him. “Why did you choose me?”

Ventus looks up. “I don’t know.” It sounds like a question. “You… You looked tired. And you said, ‘I need to feel something.’ And…” He hesitates. “And I needed to feel something too. Or. I needed _you_ to feel something, maybe.”

Vanitas rakes a hand through his hair, fingers ripping through the snarls. “Trust me, Ventus, I am feeling a whole lot of things right now.” A putrid mess of emotions sits curdling in his gut, but with Ventus teetering over the edge like that, there’s no space to actually experience them. He thuds his skull back against the windowpane, and looks up at the sky overhead, at the last vestiges of the night. He squeezes his eyes shut.

“You know,” Vanitas says, and his voice sounds distant even to himself, “this is probably the worst couple weeks of my life.”

Voice small, fragile: “Because of me?”

“No,” Vanitas replies, firmly. He opens his eyes and meets Ventus’ cringing gaze. “Did I tell you why I was at the bar?”

“You told me your best friends left you,” Ventus says, and Vanitas can’t help the ugly smile that splits his face.

“Ha, did I really say it like that?” Vanitas laughs to himself. He curls his body forward, legs pulling up to his chest as he drives the heels of his palms into his eye sockets. 

“It’s part of why I chose you. Because my best friends abandoned me too!” Ventus continues in a rush, voice climbing, and Vanitas drops his hands to stare at him, at the starving gleam in his eyes. “They had this big fight, and I was caught in the middle, and things were terrible. The only thing they could talk about was how disappointed they were in each other, how annoyed they were. They kept forgetting to ask about me even though I always, _always_ , asked about them.” The words come spilling out his mouth, faster and increasingly frantic, with desperation weighing down each syllable.

“They both moved away, and I got fewer and fewer calls and texts and plans to meet up, until I barely heard from either of them at all.” He makes a sharp gesture at the apartment behind Vanitas, where his life is all swept up and packed for easy removal. “They were supposed to come visit me this weekend. It took _so much work_ to get them to agree. We were supposed to try and work things out. Hang out like we used to, play games, eat ice cream, and watch the sunrise together.” Ventus grins, all teeth and no joy. “But they canceled on me last minute. Both of them.” He chokes on a sad little laugh and swipes at his eyes. “I guess the friendship mattered more to me than it did to them! Pathetic, huh?”

Vanitas doesn’t think he breathed through any of that; it was so much, so fast. The world careens around the fire escape. The only thing he can see clearly is Ventus’ flushed face, where the misery that consumes his heart is so exposed. “You must be so lonely.” 

Ventus hiccups through another laugh, but doesn’t disagree. “I’m so tired,” he says again. “I need it to stop. I can’t keep being forgotten and left behind.” He shakes his head. “Not by my friends. You know what I mean, right? You know why I can’t take this anymore.” He looks over at Vanitas, and.

He can’t. “Ventus…” He shouldn’t be talking about this right now, but he _can’t_. “My friends didn’t leave me.” Confusion sweeps across Ventus’ face, but before he can open his mouth, Vanitas says, “Ephemer and Skuld. They died.”

Ventus’ face goes ashen.

Vanitas covers his eyes. He can’t remember the last time he was gentle for himself. “Can we go inside?” The air feels thin inside his lungs. He thinks he might be freaking out. “Please?”

“I can’t.”

A beat.

“But you can come outside. If you want.”

He does.

His socks are still wet. There’s a breeze out here that he didn’t quite get when he was half inside. He’s not sure if he trusts his legs to support him right now, not while the soles of his feet buzz with pins and needles. He stays close to the wall.

Ventus mumbles, “I’m sorry about your friends. I didn’t realize. I…” He chews at his lip and looks away. “Do you want to talk about it?”

“No. Yes.” This is so fucking stupid. Vanitas is supposed to be the one comforting Ventus, not the other way around. He grabs at the railing next to him for support, peers at the long way down to the cracked pavement.

“We were going to the grocery store,” he breathes. “I forgot something in the car, so I went back to the parking lot. They went on ahead. It was a busy day, so our spot was really crap. Like as far from the store as possible. And. When I finally got close to the store, I heard gunshots.

“I found them. Ephemer and Skuld. They barely made it through the doorway.” The memories swarm in to suffocate him, unbearable and sticky and with the barest whiff of Skuld’s perfume. Him, alone, staggering back from the wreckage of their bodies, red footprints smearing across the tile.

Nothing else mattered after that.

Life without them is quiet. After a medic looked him over and proclaimed him perfectly healthy, Vanitas returned home, only to find that it no longer existed.

Their apartment, which only that morning had been filled with cooking smells and inside jokes, had transformed into a tomb for their memories. It was wrong. It was wrong that entire pieces of Vanitas’ heart were ripped apart but nothing else in the world had changed to mark this devastation. So he tore down Skuld’s hideous dandelion wallpaper, and packed up all the little remnants of their lives into stacks of boxes. Then, he packed up all his pain, swallowed that poison whole, and ran to hide at his cousin’s apartment, where he refused to reveal the necrosis of his soul to anyone.

And now look at him.

Snuffling through a runny nose like some child. Unable to keep his shit together long enough to help Ventus, whose blue eyes had carried tears since the moment they first met.

Ventus, whose neck is irritated red from the unkind rope fibers.

Ventus, who had lured Vanitas home so that he may find his remains in the morning.

It hadn’t registered before, not fully. But now the gravity of this fucked up situation hits Vanitas with such force that he stops breathing altogether. He feels—

“How could you fucking _use_ me like this?”

It’s barely a whisper. But Ventus hears it. His head whips around, lips parted and those stupid teary eyes wide at having been caught. For a cruel moment, Vanitas imagines shoving him over the railing and being done with this whole shit show.

“It’s not like that,” Ventus starts. “You don’t understand—”

“No, I’m pretty sure I do.” Vanitas nearly vibrates out of his skin. This isn’t shock. He knows shock. He is fucking _furious_. He shouldn’t be succumbing to rage, not right now at this fucking critical moment, but it’s so easy to sink into. He snarls, “I’m a tool for you. A messenger. That’s why you left those phone numbers. You were going to have me call your friends. You were going to have me break the news.”

Ventus shakes his head frantically, eyes squeezed shut as he cries, “I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” The tears hanging from his eyelashes spill down his cheeks and he lifts one hand to clutch at his heart. “You’re right, I messed up so bad. I’m wrong. I’m all _wrong_. I’m—” He looks up at the sky, lower lip quivering as he sucks in a hiccuping gasp and holds it. “I’m so tired of being alone. I guess I didn’t want to be alone at the end.” He offers Vanitas a sad smile and the anger roaring through Vanitas’ blood stutters, the fury evaporating and leaving emptiness in its wake. “I’m sorry. I really am sorry that you got dragged into this. And I hope that someday you forgive me.” Dawn shines rosy pink behind his golden hair. “But I understand if you can’t.”

He lets go.

There hadn’t been much ceremony surrounding Ephemer and Skuld’s funerals. Their ashes had been buried in some cemetery that Vanitas hadn’t known about until he absolutely had to. Their grave markers were unremarkable amid an endless swarm that stabbed out of the ground like they were trying to pierce the heavens. When they went into the earth, part of Vanitas went with them. Afterwards, he set out on a personal mission to smother the remaining bit of himself still tethered to his body. But he never quite managed it.

Now, as he watches Ventus’ fingers release the railing and his body lurch backwards, that lasting bit of his soul interred in his body wavers like candlelight in the wind. That’s when Vanitas knows—deep in the pit of his mangled heart—that if Ventus succeeds and kills himself right here and now, then he will leap off this fire escape to join him.

Vanitas doesn’t particularly want to live.

But.

He doesn’t want Ventus to die, either.

Vanitas springs forward, hips smashing into the metal railing with a horrible crash. He moves like a man possessed: snatching Ventus out of the air, hauling him over the railing, and slamming him down onto the landing. The steel grating rumbles around them from the impact. Ventus lies on his back and wheezes, too dazed to protest when Vanitas plants a knee on either side of him and pins him in place. 

The sudden energy rush drains out of Vanitas all at once. His heart threatens to burst free from its cage. He stares down at Ventus beneath him, still gulping shallowly for air. Vanitas realizes he’s doing the same. He shivers and hunches forward.

Ventus doesn’t fight him when he tugs the noose up and off with slow fingers. He only returns Vanitas’ stare with one of his own. They stay there, silently looking at each other, until Vanitas’ vision goes hot and blurry. Ventus murmurs, awed, “You’re crying.”

Vanitas can’t help it. Tears run hot over his cheeks.

“Why’d you save me?” Ventus wonders. He bites his lip. His eyebrows draw together over misty eyes and a stray tear slides free. “I…I used you. You shouldn’t have— I don’t _deserve_ —” He falls silent when Vanitas’ hands fist in the collar of his shirt.

“I’m not going to just let you die,” he says, wrenching the fabric between his fingers. “I’m not.”

Ventus gazes up at Vanitas. For a moment, he just looks at him, eyes wide and reverent. He reaches up a tentative hand and brushes away Vanitas’ tears with his thumb.

In the distance, the sun rises.


End file.
